One of the shiny, silver instruments Dr. Patrick Dowling uses many times a day tests for sensation on the soles of feet.

Numbness is a familiar symptom of diabetes, a disease that has become a common problem among Dowling’s patients as well as for an increasing number of men, women and their children nationwide. It’s also a concern as more people age.

That’s because while the average life expectancy for men and women has increased from 75.2 years in 1990 to 78.2 years in 2010 because of vaccines and better medicines, Americans are losing healthy years due to dietary risks that lead to chronic diseases, according to a study published last summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We’re delaying death in people, but not necessarily prolonging (quality of) life,” said Dowling, a UCLA professor who practices family medicine at clinics in Santa Monica and Van Nuys.

But with health coverage now expanded to millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act, physicians such as Dowling hope the U.S. has seen its peak in the rise of chronic diseases related to obesity. One provision under the ACA is to increase access to preventive services. Education and regular doctor visits for young and older adults can’t come soon enough, Dowling and others say.

Researchers led by Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, found that in the last 20 years, dietary risks, tobacco smoking, high body mass index, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity and alcohol use all contribute to the loss of healthy years.

“From 1990 to 2010, the United States made substantial progress in improving health,” according to a summary from the report. “Life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy increased, all-cause death rates at all ages decreased, and age-specific rates of years lived with disability remained stable.

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“However, morbidity and chronic disability now account for nearly half of the U.S. health burden, and improvements in population health in the United States have not kept pace with advances in population health in other wealthy nations.”

When he was a med student 30 years ago in Cook County, Illinois, Dowling said young doctors were taken to visit an 80-year-old man, a rarer age among patients then.

These days, Dowling said he sees up to three patients a day who are in their 90s. Better vaccinations, aspirin, cholesterol medications and smoking prevention efforts have all helped. But Americans have found other ways to put their health at risk, and one only has to compare the family dinner table 30 years ago with today to see why.

“When people had dinner in the 1980s, they were having a family meal,” Dowling said. “If you were a kid, you were probably drinking milk. Maybe your Dad had a cigarette after a meal. You fast forward to now and you may or may not be sitting down, there may be a pizza there and you’re going to be drinking some sort of carbonated soda,” Dowling said.

Not only has the diet changed, but so have dinner-time habits, which contribute to the way we eat.

“Now, you’re less likely to have a family dinner,” Dowling said. “The food is going to be processed. The drinks are going to different. The kids are going to be looking at iPhones. It’s not a group meeting anymore. Mom and maybe Dad are not going to be smoking at the table anymore, but everyone’s weight has changed.”

Dowling and other health experts say the result is more Type 2 diabetes among high school students.

In addition, physicians are seeing more fatty liver disease in 12-year-olds, and teens with gall bladder stones, typically associated with obesity.

On a recent weekday, Dowling examined the feet of Salvador Santoyo, a 71-year-old man from Maywood who takes 16 different medications a day to control a variety of illnesses, including diabetes.

Santoyo’s son-in-law, Jesus Lima, 35, said Santoyo’s health issues have motivated he and his wife to change the way they eat, for the sake of their two daughters, ages 5 and 7.

“We used to go out to eat a lot, but we’ve changed that,” Lima said. “We go out once a week, and we try to stick to natural foods. We try to avoid McDonald’s. We eat more salads. We changed the traditional pork posole to chicken.”

Lisa Thacker, a single mom from Valley Glen, said was glad she was encouraged to take nutrition education classes when a pediatrician told her that her 6-year-old daughter was obese.

“It freaked me out,” she said. “I don’t want her to get diabetes, or have the kids laugh at her.”

She credits the classes at Kaiser Permanente, Woodland Hills with helping her help her child. As a child, Thacker remembers only eating out once a week, and her mom prepared all meals.

“My daughter and I changed almost everything we’re doing,” she said. “We eat more multi-grain chips and vegetables. Eating out has been totally eliminated.”